Half the internet just stopped working as thousands of sites go down for people worldwide
Topics: News, Social Media, Technology, Twitter
Rhianna Benson
Featured Image Credit: X
Topics: News, Social Media, Technology, Twitter
A major portion of the internet is reportedly down, with users across Cloudflare platforms like Zoom, Canva, LinkedIn, Vimeo, and Down Detector being unable to access these sites.
Such is also the case for the likes of Notion, X, and Stack Overflow.
It's not just media and business sites that have taken the blow, however, with shopping sites also down, including Shopify, JustEat, Amazon Web Services, ASDA, Deliveroo and Iceland.
When trying to access these sites, customers/readers are being confronted with a '500 internet server error' message.
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Clocking onto the issue, one X user noted: "every site on the internet just went down."
"damn, half the internet is down again," another added. "even downdetector is down."
"THE INTERNET IS DOWN. I REPEAT THE INTERNET IS DOWN," a third also warned.
This isn't the first time that Cloudflare websites have suddenly disappeared, however, with the same incident occurring back in November.
For those in need of a reminder, the server - which provides a global network of services to make websites and apps both fast and secure - is estimated to provide services to one in five of the world’s websites.
The first update shared on November's outage was shared on Amazon's service status page, reads: "We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We will provide another update in the next 30-45 minutes."
Dozens of websites crashed at the time, with the company's CEO, Matthew Prince also issuing a formal apology on the matter, 'for the pain we caused the internet'.
In a blog post released at the time, Prince claimed the glitch had been prompted by the system that Cloudflare uses to protect its sites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, crashing. These attacks aim to disrupt a server's traffic by sending it into overdrive.
That said, however, Prince insisted that the major outage was not caused by a cyberattack.
DDoS are an attempt to disrupt a server’s traffic by overwhelming it, though Prince stressed the outage was not itself caused by a cyberattack.
"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers," the firm said in a statement at the time.
"Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available."
Of the latest incident, a company spokesperson said the server was enduring 'internal service degradation'.